Not everybody has to have a large and spacious garden for their children to want to play in it. Kids love the outdoors and have amazing imaginations when it comes to playing. Using the space you have to create a playground area for your kids is probably one of the best things you can do.

If you do not have much room then having a playground set, where the swings and slide are joined together is a good idea, but also you can put one thing one side of the yard or garden and something on the other side, or at the ends. Spacing out the apparatus you have may make the area seem a bit smaller, but your children won’t be the slightest bit bothered about that - all they will want is their own playground, and you will have provided that for them. (more…)

We would all like to think our children are getting enough exercise, but in this day and age most of them are not. It’s hard for kids today to find something that is more interesting than virtually running around a space station shooting anything that moves and everything that doesn’t, being able to fly around a virtual world, that is just like this one or to just drive around a track in a banana.

Children of all ages find the playgrounds boring, out of date and just not up to the their challenging minds. Well that is all going to change, because some one has done it, they have actually gone and done it. What? You might be thinking, what have they done? (more…)

It is true that we all have a bit of the kid inside us and when we take our children, grandchildren or younger siblings to a playground, we would like to play as well. We do in away, but we are not allowed on any of the equipment that is provided. Having playground equipment that can be used by all, and I mean all ages, would be a great leap forward in the enjoyment families can spend together.

A Professor Killingsworth from Pittsburg State University’s Department of Health, Human Performance and Recreation, thinks the same way and has formed (with other community members) a non-profit group called Credible Arts Therapies. He has said the idea behind a universally accessible playground is to have a place where everyone, regardless of age or disability, can play together on the same equipment. You can read more about this here: http://www.joplinglobe.com/local/local_story_178210855.html (more…)

There is a lot of research that has been completed on what causes injuries in the playground, but no-one had gone through the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS) database before, until now that is.

A study has been completed by the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, Indiana School of Medicine, Indiana University, where injury data from 2002 – 2004 from slides, monkey bars and swings were analyzed.

They found that 22728 emergency visits to the hospital were recorded in the NEISS database, and 83.9% of these injuries were caused by swings, slides and monkey bars. (more…)

Being such an advocate of rubber mulch, I am really happy to read success stories about rubber mulch applications. I came across one such story today entitled ‘Blue Mulch, Green Park’ about the first playground in the city of Corpus Christi to have rubber mulch installed.

The Kid’s Place playground is the first playground to switch from wood mulch to rubber mulch in a move to becoming a greener city. This is fully backed by the Corpus Christi Career Development Class 2008, who have created community projects to make their city greener. It was twenty volunteers from this class who spread the 62 tons of rubber mulch needed to create this safer and greener playground. (more…)

Playgrounds are a place where children develop their social skills. Is this something that should be done unsupervised? Do children automatically grasp the concepts of sharing, taking turns, and being a good loser, as well as a winner, without guidance?

I will stick my neck out and say no. As a parent, I would like to know that my child’s play is being supervised in a playground by a teacher or playground monitor. However, this is rarely the case at school. (more…)

Every parent has to have a certain amount of responsibility, especially when it comes to their children and the playground. Kids can be nasty little creatures, so the fact that, not everyone likes everybody, is something that is carried on from childhood.

I’m not saying that in a playground, you should keep your kids away from the ones that they don’t like, but try to have a responsible attitude to how they react to children that are not nice. You have to instill a certain amount of common sense when it comes to your kids, integrating with others, in the playground and not go on their defense at every opportunity. (more…)

When traveling around I have been surprised at the lack of, if you like, communal playground areas. By this I mean playgrounds that are all together, young and older kids can run around the same area.

Obviously you don’t want a fourteen year old running into a four year old, they would knock them for six, but we could have one end for the bigger kids and one end for the smaller ones.

When I was a kid, many moons ago, there was such a place like this in a town near where I lived, the actual playground, had a big hedge around it, there where picnic benches in there, so all the family could sit and have something to eat, swings for the little ones where at one end, with slides, climbing frames and roundabouts, that none of the bigger kids wanted to play on. At the other end was where the older kids had larger pieces of equipment, swings their size, bigger climbing frames and things that the younger kids could not really play on. (more…)

In the United States over the past few years, there has been a lot more housing developments being built. The one thing that really grabs people with these new places, is the closeness and community feeling they give.

What does not seem to enter into the equation though, is the fact that all the play areas for the children seem to be the same, and have looked the same for the past fifteen years. Do they have just one person that designs the play areas for children, do the same thing all over the country, then go abroad, look at what they have, move it around a bit and then do exactly the same thing. Is there only one company producing swings, slides, roundabouts and funny looking things as climbing frames? (more…)

It is likely that wherever you are in the world, there will be a playground game, or derivative of, which has been played by children in playgrounds all over the world.

One such game is Duck Duck Goose, where children sit in a circle facing one another, and one is appointed ‘it’. ‘It’ walks around the circle touching people on the head and saying out loud whether they are a duck or a goose. When a goose is picked, that child gets up and chases ‘it’ around the circle and tries to get to the empty seat first, whoever is left standing becomes (or remains) ‘it’ and has to select a new set of ducks and a goose.

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